You say toe – may – toe, I say [expletive] that Aug 17th, 2004

This product manager has a requirements document in his hand. Damn business requirements document to Hell.

“Hey there, you got a second?”

“Sure. I guess.”

“Can I talk to you about this feature? When we went over this in the meeting two weeks ago, I thought we all agreed that using violet for the links and buttons was the way to go.”

“We did. But that color was clashing with background and other branded elements. I sent out an email last week to change it. Everyone else was fine with the change.”

“You did? I didn’t see that email.”

“Yeah, I did.”

“Well… I think we need to change it back to violet. Would you mind doing that? Also, the requirements documents clearly states it needs to be violet, so we should stick to it.”

“What the hell is the link color doing in the requirements document? How is that a business requirement?”

“You didn’t read the requirements document?”

“What?”

“Look, I don’t want to make this a big deal. The execs already agreed to the requirements so let’s just switch it back please.”

“But it looks…”

“I have to go to a meeting. Are we done with this conversation yet?”

Dealing with engineers

“No.”

“What?”

“I said no.”

“Why? Why can’t we do that?”

“It won’t work.”

“Why won’t it work?”

“It’s complicated. There’s a lot of technical details.”

“I’ve got time.”

“I don’t. I’m not going to code it that way just because you, Design Nazi, say so. Besides, it’s confusing.”

“Confusing? Says who? Do we have user testing data that says that?”

“I don’t know. Don’t you guys have that stuff?”

“Are you saying no because you don’t like the design or because you don’t know how to code it?”

“I have a lot of work to do. Are we done yet?”

Dealing with marketing managers

“Ohhhh… that’s so cool.”

“Thanks. Glad you like it.”

“It’s great. Really great. But… Where’s the ad?”

“Right here, along the right side.”

“Oh… there it is. Wow. You know… I really love this design, but the ad needs to be right in the middle. Otherwise people won’t click on it.”

“People don’t click on it because it’s animated. And it’s ugly. Can’t we put some guidelines down for our advertisers so they stop making ugly animated ads?”

“Are you serious? You must be joking. Why one earth would we do something as stupid as that?”

“Fine. Are we done with this conversation yet? I have a wall I have to smack my head against.”

“Hunh?”

“Nevermind.”

Dealing with executives

“Are we done here? Good. Glad to hear things are going well”

Dealing with other designers

“Oh my God!”

“What?!?”

“If you use that design, you’ll increase your boring quotient by 50%.”

“Well… that seems a bit harsh, don’t you think?”

“That thing you just showed us… is awful. Hit the drawing board again. Hit it hard.”

“Don’t listen to him, I think it’s fine.”

“You do? You don’t think it’s boring? Or awful?”

“I like it. It’s more readable. The background color is blinding, but if that’s the color you like, I guess… Well, I guess you should stick with it.”

“Blinding? How?”

“You want to know what I think?”

“Who are you?”

“I was just sitting over here enjoying a glass a wine and overheard the conversation. I think the design suffers too much from looking like everything else out there. I mean really…. You’re going to publish that?”

“You got another glass of wine?”

“Oh! That’s my cell. Are we done? I gotta take this.”

Standards rant

Repeat after me
Standards do not block, impede or otherwise hinder innovation. Businessmen, engineers or product managers who only care
about how they want to implement technology or only care about their own bottom line are the ones doing the real damage
in the larger economic picture.

Design by Fire strives to be as standards compliant as humanly possible in spite of the fact that those in charge of developing
the technology, the browsers and the operating systems can't seem to to code to the W3C specification with 100% compliance.

However, even though I'm a firm believer in standards, I'm beyond sick and tired of trying to figure out what works and what does not
work according to the W3C specification. So while I make every attempt to do the right thing, occasionally I'll just do what
I have to get the thing working. In other words, if you run any Design by Fire URI through a code validator and find invalid
markup or css, please don't bother sending me an email.

With that little rant out of the way, here are some good articles about the benefits of web standards.

And of course, there's Zeldman's Designing with
Web Standards, which is easily one of the best reads from both a practical and technical point of view on the subject.

All of these sources discuss simplification of code, rapid development, smaller file sizes, faster download times,
better accessibility for a larger set of users, easier code maintenance and platform scalability - all benefits of standards at a
technological level. There's also some ROI discussion on using standards.

Really Simple Syndication is still a pain in the ass

Andrei Michael Herasimchuk Designer

Updated 2010 The quick and dirty summary is that I am largely considered
one of the first official interface designers hired by Adobe Systems. That is, the first one hired to do nothing but interface
design across the professional product line. I worked personally on the interfaces for Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator,
and Adobe InDesign.

One of these days, I'll convince Adobe's legal eagles to let me write a book about all that I have been through while working on
those products. I just doubt they'll agree to it in my lifetime. Until, then you'll have to be satisfied with the
History of Photoshop, an article written by a long-time friend of mine, Jeff Schewe.

Play

Having the opportunity to work on Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Lightroom has given me a chance to explore
photography in way I would not have had access to otherwise. You can find samples of all my personal work on this web site,
and unless otherwise noted, everything here is photographed by me.

For a short period of time, I was exploring a screenwriting career. I had a script optioned by Hyde Park Entertainment (a division of
MGM), a studio that has since gone under. I even had an agent in Beverly Hills for a short period of time.

I enjoy playing poker on the side and find the game infinitely fascinating. I have made the final table in a few
bigger tournaments. One at The Hall of Fame Poker Classic
and the other at the Bay 101 Open, but no World Series of Poker bracelet
for me yet. I have had the opportunity to play against some world-class poker professionals and have gotten crushed by them.

In my off time I play bass guitar and far too many video games.

Publications and Awards

Industry Awards 1995-2000
Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign have won far too many awards than is possible to list here.

The History of Photoshop February 2000
An article written by Jeff Schewe for Photo Electronic
Imaging Magazine. This covers the history and development of Photoshop. A copy of this article can be found
here in PDF format. You can also find another copy on Jeff's web site,
Schewe Photography.

Design Graphics, Cover Story June 1999, Issue 46
This article covered the work I did on the
redesign of the professional product line while at Adobe.

Collage with Photoshop 1994
This book
features 14 digital artists using Photoshop and Specular Collage. I'm only mentioned in the prologue, but the book was
created to promote Collage and what digital artists were doing with it at the time. I'm still fairly proud about the book
and the work produced inside of it.

Education

Amherst College 1989 to 1990Left Amherst College to start Specular Int'l

Contact

Colophon and other details

Design by Fire v4.0 A quick overview of the design and implementation
of DxF for those who care about such details.

Browser Support

If you are viewing Design by Fire in either Firefox or Safari, congratulations! You are experiencing Design by Fire
in the manner it was intended. If you are using Internet Explorer 6.0 or less, you have my sympathies as you are getting a
version slightly less dynamic. The reason for that is due to Microsoft's lack of support for the CSS property "position: fixed;"
plus a few other things.

Bottom line, Internet Explorer promises to fix these things in version 7, so in the meantime you can either download the
beta for IE7 or switch to Firefox.

Typography

If you have purchased the Adobe Creative Suite, you should
have Helvetica Neue installed in your font library. If so, then
you are reading Design by Fire as it was intended to be read. For everyone else, you are either seeing Lucida Grande or
Arial.

Clearly, Helvetica Neue is far superior.

As for the logotype of Design by Fire, it's set using the classic
Bodoni typeface, complete with ligature for that extra flourish.

Content Management System

This version of Design by Fire is managed using WordPress. So long MovableType.